shopping at free people, i accept all the pronouns, weight loss, or not, pepper, rebecca solnit, käthe kollwitz, tower of mothers

03 May, 2026

yesterday i was grateful for shopping clothing with holly and the new cotton overall's i purchased at free people...

today i am looking forward to a sunny spring day and the farmer's market...

so... day two of writing my daily journal straight into my blog... the new procedure i have is to write what i write here which will be mostly thoughts about what happened yesterday or broader thoughts that are coming to me in the moment... publish it... and then use Bear note and web clipping app to capture the published page as a journal entry and add anything that wasn't for broader consumption... easy peasy and it should help me post daily or at least almost daily...

yesterday holly and i decided to go to costco with a stop at the danbury fair mall to do some clothing shopping... we skipped the stores i am usually interested in (banana republic, anthropologie) and went straight to free people where holly likes to shop... generally free people is a little too boho or flower child for me... but it's perfect for holly's vibe... even so, i always browse for myself... i found this lovely jump suit...

but, the biggest size they had was large... extra large is usually on line... i knew i had to try it on in the store to be sure i was getting the right size because sometimes large is ok and sometimes not... in this case it was perfect... but the fun part was finding a saleswoman and telling her i wanted to try it on... which she knew immediately as i approached her and didn't miss a beat in getting me set up in a changing room... and then there was the moment when i wanted my wife's opinion and so had to step out to show her... the young sales woman who hadn't missed a beat told me i looked really cute in it... which made me smile... my wife approved too...

while i was waiting for my wife to finish trying things on, a young woman came out of a dressing room with a pair of pants she was trying on... she was asking the saleswoman to cofirm that she looked ok from behind... then i hear "sir... um... mam," what do you think?... i told her she looked great (she did)... i wish i had let her know that i accept all the pronouns... i greatly appreciated the awareness... and being perceived as a mam, even if it was her second thought... i accept all the pronouns because i have not done, and don't intend to do, a complete transition... and in my own internal dialogue i still think of myself as he, more than she... and because i love who i am in this moment and that is what matters most... i also think it's a lot of pressure on people to expect them to overcome their first reaction to you so that's what i tell everyone... whatever pronoun comes to mind when you see me, that's the one you use... i am all the pronouns... happily so...

this is another step in my becoming comfortable with being who i am in public in all situations... trying on and buying women's clothing in stores... at the beginning it was all online shopping... it took me a long time to work up the courage to do it in brick and mortar stores... once again i discovered that the world is a pretty accommodating place... at least where i live... there are many areas of my country where i'd be hesitant to present femininely at all, let alone shop openly for dresses in a brick and mortar store...

i am wearing the jumpsuit today (see photo at top)... with a fine stripped linen shirt dress over the top, unbuttoned... it's a bit chilly for it but i am manifesting summer vibes...

i am struggling with my weight... a while back i was happily heading towards 210 lbs... this morning i stepped on the scale and was 218.6 lbs... ugh!... and i feel like my bowling ball baby belly (bbbb?) is more prominent than ever... i resolved this morning... yet again... to count every calorie and be super careful what i eat... i really want a more girlish/boyish figure if such a thing is even possible for a 71 year old amab... probably only in my mind but my mind can't get there if there isn't some supporting evidence...

i have my eye on this bathing suit from pepper, my new favorite undergarment store:

i love pepper... they solved my bra/lengerie problem, which is that i am pretty flat chested and have a big band size... they sell specifically to small chested women with band size up to 40 (42 in some garments)... from their about page:

We’ve grown from a bra startup to a full-on movement, spanning luxe lingerie, swimwear, and more, but our mission hasn’t changed: To help small-chested women unapologetically celebrate the bodies they have.

or, in my case, unapologetically feminize the body i have...

i liked a post from rebecca solnit on "the myth" of the utility of violence and a democracy of voices...

about the utility of violence...

Chenoweth says research shows that "the non-violent campaigns were twice as likely to have succeeded as their violent counterparts. And that the rates of success for non-violent campaigns had actually increased over the latter half of the 20th century and into the beginning of the 21st. So, in other words, non-violent resistance was working much more than skeptics like myself would have expected. At the same time, that doesn't mean that it worked all the time. We found basically that about around half of the cases that we studied had succeeded and about 25% of the cases of armed resistance had succeeded. "

and this from the section on having a fair share of voice...

It took me ten years and dozens of feminist essays from that morning I wrote “Men Explain Things to Me” [in 2008] to realize that I was not talking and writing, after all, about violence against women, though I was reading about it incessantly. I was writing about what it means not to have a voice and making the case for a redistribution of that vital power. The crucial sentence in “Men Ex- plain Things to Me” is “Credibility is a basic survival tool.” But I was wrong that it’s a tool. You hold a tool in your own hands, and you use it yourself. What it does is up to you.

Your credibility arises in part from how your society perceives people like you, and we have seen over and over again that no mat- ter how credible some women are by supposedly objective stan- dards reinforced by evidence and witnesses and well- documented patterns, they will not be believed by people committed to protect- ing men and their privileges. The very definition of women under patriarchy is designed to justify inequality, including inequality of credibility.